There's no truth in you
There's no truth in me
The truth is between


Fiona Rae, The World Explains the Way You Feel, 2010

Three To Get Ready
-- by klipschutz

1.
“Leash Yr Doggerel”
-graffito, outside the Poetics Department, SUNY Buffalo

The President is homeless
The Dictator is flash
The Actor has a megaphone
The Dialectician talks inorganic trash

Rhyming comes too easy
but free verse is a joke
that anyone can tell
without knowing how to tell a joke

O that’s not fair or true
I’m neither one myself
& drowning in a pit of lack
of youth, good cheer & wealth

-I want, I want, I want
-So what? So what? So what?
Fred Seidel can’t help be rich
Justin Bieber too shall rot
Pill me, nurse!
before I turn back into Ogden Nash
who did right by Baltimore: was on a stamp.
-All better now? -Much, thanks.

2.
Word Premiere

“You’ll hear it first tonight, in a few hundred beats of the heart, so please kill your silencers, prick up your ears, remove your piece and put extremities away, for the occasion is historic, if only in the eyes of cataractic semiotes who can’t help observe their own absence-in-presence. It remains axiomatic that language comes and goes, as do women, as do men, and country codes. Fashionista, mouse potato, spyware, biodiesel, soul patch, unibrow, manga, buzzkill, paywall, cheeseball, steampunk, tweetup, bromance, wardrobe malfunction. To drop a few. We have been to the mountaintop, brothers and sisters, and our legs are not even tired – we were in a helicopter! Ba-da-bing! All seriousness aside, the feeling is well nigh, there is not a dry anvil in the house, the klieg lights are hot and bright, pizza dust is dazzling the air. Will someone hand the envelope to me. . .”

3.
Centenary On Ice

Turned a hundred this year:
Reagan, Bishop and. . .Kenneth Patchen.
Kenneth Who? you might ask, to which I would reply:
Fuck you, with my turn-it-up charm,
unless of course you were too big or beautiful,
in which case, I would say: Exactly.

I’ve done my time with Dutch.
who can’t inaugurate more harm, though he continues to cast
a muzzy glow across the past.

Ms. Bishop’s silences have served her well.
Teachers fawn over the fish that she threw back.
She’s alright, I guess.

Patchen lives. In my heart. Is with me.
Check him out.